Sustainable development initiatives take a bold turn in Portugal as a tech start-up unveils a model of a smart city with interconnected water, energy, waste management and climate control systems that can sustain about 150,000 people.

Aptly dubbed the “City with a Brain,” the smart city project is located on the outskirts of Paredes in northern Portugal and is spearheaded by LivingPlanIT, an international business that specializes on innovative and sustainable city-scale technologies.

The proposed project entails installing sensors that will monitor energy usage, temperature, and occupancy in each of the buildings in the city. Similar to the inner workings of the human brain, the information gathered by the sensors will be transmitted to a central system that may adjust the heat or power levels of buildings in real-time.